Chris Garlock/American Go E-Journal
Photo Credit

It was early in round 1 of the US Open that I noticed Chris Garlock take an interest in what I was doing on my opponents’s clock. I was stitching together hexagons. Why not? I fiddled around a little, perhaps threading a needle. Chris waited patiently until I was actively stitching again, and took his shot. Thanks for sharing it with me.

Those interested in seeing how much work I accomplished at the congress can see day by day photographs here.

I know I’m not the first person to add their feet to a quilting blog post, but I just couldn’t resist.

The pieces started going together yesterday, and a great deal of work has been accomplished already. This took me much longer than it should have for the following reason. I accidentally added a row of flowers like the one below in the wrong direction.

Ripping out the stitching and restitching would have taken enough time to be annoying. To make matters worse, I did not find my mistake until I had taken out all of the paper pieces but the ones on the outer most border of the work. My sense of order required me to rip out the stitching with no paper pieces in place for stabilization, and to reattach the row in the proper direction.  I wasn’t even sure it could be done, but I challenge you to notice a difference in the quality of the stitching in the area in which it occurred. What gives away the location of this seam is the basting stitches on hexagons that were at one time on the outer border, but have since found their way closer to the center.

After removing the row of flowers and reattaching it, I was left with portions lacking stabilization as I attached the next row of solid flowers.  A lot of tedious and unnecessary work resulted from my lack of attention to the fact that I wanted the brown batik to be uppermost in position in each row of batik flowers. I’ll be much more careful moving forward.

I have not counted how many batik flowers I have left, so I don’t know how large I am going to be able to make this piece. I do regret that it appears as if I left behind the following two pieces in New York City when I was at the Go Congress. I could not find them in my suitcase, and I am fairly certain that I took them along with me.

The solid fabrics can be replaced, but the batik fabrics can not, so I am down five batik flowers that can never be recreated. I don’t mind the work, but I do mind losing the fabric.

From Saturday, August 9th through Sunday August 17th I was in attendance at the annual U.S. Go Congress.  This year it was held in New York City at the Hotel Pennsylvania.  I had plenty of opportunity to stitch while I was enjoying the activities of the congress.

For those who do not know, go is an Asian board game that originated in China about 4,000 years ago. It is the oldest board game still played in its original form. Most years I get together with about 500 like minded individuals to play tournament games, attend lectures, and socialize.

I decided to document my stitching by photographing my progress each day on a go board. Here is what I put together during the week.

Saturday:

Sunday:

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday:

The photograph above represents the basting of 110 hexagons in one day. Each pile contains ten hexagons.

The hexagons for the batik flowers were basted in advance, but I had to baste all of the hexagons for the solid flowers. I have no idea how many hours are represented here. But I definitely had an opportunity to participate fully in the activities at the congress.

I am pleased to report that I had my best congress ever in terms of playing results. I managed to take 2nd place in the 9 kyu playing band. I had taken 3rd place three times already, but never 2nd place before.

I ordered a jelly roll of Ivory Basics from the Missouri Star Quilt Company. It was their special of the day one day, and I thought that it would be a nice way to start making low volume hexagons without having to buy a great number of different fabrics as yardage. This week I cut the strips into squares and am taking some of them to the U.S. Go Congress this coming week along with basted hexagons for my flower garden quilt.

 

Last week I blogged about beginning a new flower garden quilt and settling on a specific design for a flower.  I completed 21 flowers last week. This week I completed 13 more flowers for a total of 34 of these flower units.

In addition to the completed flowers, I have sixteen more units basted, paired up, and ready to assemble.

This will make a total of 50 flower units.  No matter how you look at it, 50 units is not enough for a quilt.  So I had to start thinking of how I was going to supplement those units to flesh out the design.

My first impulse was to reproduce the color and value of the unit, but in solids.  So I ordered some additional Kona solids.  I knew that I would need more of my maroon. However, I bought that maroon fabric from the Pennington Quilt Works, and I have no idea who made it.  It’s definitely not a Kona solid.  I looked at my Kona sample card and found the closest thing I could find, which was Kona Crimson.  Given that this new fabric will form the center of solid flowers, it won’t ever be right next to the maroon that is forming the center of the patterned flowers. There was no other color that even came close to the Crimson, so I ordered it with confidence.  I ordered a brown fabric, Kona Mocha to fill in for the brown batik. Since I already had a bit of it on hand from a previous project I was able to see that it would work well.

I learned from my recent experience in ordering Kona solids that it is hard to judge how a color is going to work from the small sample on the card. Filling in for the yellow-orange batik was not going to be so simple. There were a number of colors that might have worked, and I wanted the best one, so I ordered a range of four colors directly next to each other on the color chart. From left to right they are Ochre, Butterscotch, Yarrow, and Caramel.

The Fat Quarter Color chips for these colors are shown below.

When I got these fabrics in my hands I was able to quickly see that Caramel was the clear winner. If I had allowed myself to only order one fabric I would have probably gone with butterscotch based on what I saw on the color chart. What I liked about the Caramel fabric though, is that it gave a better sense of the overall feeling of value and color of the batik fabric that it was meant to replace.  It even matched the intensity, which I hadn’t realized was going to be important, but it turned out that it was very important to match the intensity. The caramel color was darned near perfect in every way.

I proceeded to piece together a flower using the solids of my choice, and I was happy with it. (Ignore the fabric to which the flower is attached. When I took my photos for this post I didn’t have an isolated solid flower to photograph.)

Of course, the fact that I really liked the solid flower I had just made didn’t prevent me from trying out some other options.

I auditioned these flowers up against my patterned flowers, but there was no contest. The first solid flower was the clear winner as I suspected it would be even before making the other two flowers.

It was my plan to finish piecing the patterned flowers and to make a large number of the solid flowers before starting to piece any units together.  The temptation to assemble, however, proved to be too great to resist. I started by joining four patterned flowers together with one solid flower using hunter green to hold it all together.

Then I tried joining four solid flowers with one patterned flower, once again with hunter green. I want the hunter green and maroon hexagons to predictably march across the finished quilt.

The idea I had in mind was that I might end up treating these constructions as large units that would be joined in some way. The photograph below shows the spacing that the units would take. You can probably see where two additional hunter green hexagons would go, and where another flower would fall into place.

I tried my hand at creating flowers that might work to tie the design together.

It may not be obvious, but the flower above has alternating petals of Butterscotch and Yarrow with a Caramel center.  Mmmmm… Sounds like candy.

Above we have alternating petals of Ochre and Butterscotch with a Crimson center.

And last, we have a yellow-orange batik center with Crimson petals.

My gut feeling at this time, after having done all that work, is that I will probably line up the units to create rows of patterned and solid flowers.

The beauty of working with hexagons, however, is that I can put off that decision until later. Any time spent auditioning flowers is time well spent because I can throw the rejects into a bowl and transform them into an interesting scrappy quilt at some point in the future.

I’ll be spending my time this week basting solid hexagons for assembly. I’m planning a trip soon and want to have plenty to occupy my hands on the train, in the hotel lobby, and sitting through presentations.

I am linking back to Life Under Quilts as usual. If you visit over there you will see what Jessica has worked on this week, and you can also click the links at the bottom to see the work of the others who link back.